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This deal's getting worse all the time.

Pluto is a planet and that makes this new one "Planet 10."

And we'll be going there real soon.

The Bee Girls that is, https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If you're a fiscal conservative, why would you even consider voting Republican?

I don't think R/D makes any difference when it comes to money and debt, both are bad.

I vote Republican because the Democrats are for gun control, and I believe that is a crime against humanity. Yes, seriously, I believe that disarming citizens causes real harm in the long run to everyone.

If Bernie Sanders would come out tomorrow and say the following:

"I support a constitutional amendment respecting the individual right to keep and bear arms as both personal and collective security against threats to the citizens of this country from all threats, foreign and domestic, to include the US government should it overstep the US Constitution".

I'd switch sides and support him in a heartbeat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That is Diane Feinstein on the gun ban in 1995.
âoeIf I could have banned them all â" âMr. and Mrs. America turn in your gunsâ(TM) â" I would have!â

I will NEVER vote Democrat until that changes.

I googled this and found this from an OGML discussion going on about this GPU. There are some screenshots and even a youtube video.

Since 2010, Jeff Bush (github, blog) has been working on an Apache-licensed open source GPU (github, home page, wiki), and he has a few other interesting github projects as well (link, link, link). The Nyuzi Processor is a fully functional GPU. It is written in synthesizable Verilog, has a functional compiler toolchain, and comes with test suites, benchmarks, the software component of 3D rendering engine, and more. Its development has been gaining momentum in discussions (link, link, Google Group) and coding projects (gsoc). It has been implemented on an Altera FPGA, and there are some videos online of it animating a rotating teapot and a Phong-shaded torus, along with the results of recently-added mipmap support. Recently, Jeff Bush got together with the founder of the Open Graphics Project, and they co-wrote a peer-reviewed publication about this GPU and some experiments they did, which was recently presented at a well-respected academic CS conference (ISPASS). Although its developer and other hobbyists are doing this for fun, academics and engineers who specialize in GPU architecture are already showing interest in using Nyuzi for their own research (e.g. link, link), which gives them finally an open platform to estimate not just cycle count but also clock frequency, energy, and circuit area effects of GPU design experiments.

I googled this and found this from an OGML discussion going on about this GPU. There are some screenshots and even a youtube video.

Since 2010, Jeff Bush (github, blog) has been working on an Apache-licensed open source GPU (github, home page, wiki), and he has a few other interesting github projects as well (link, link, link). The Nyuzi Processor is a fully functional GPU. It is written in synthesizable Verilog, has a functional compiler toolchain, and comes with test suites, benchmarks, the software component of 3D rendering engine, and more. Its development has been gaining momentum in discussions (link, link, Google Group) and coding projects (gsoc). It has been implemented on an Altera FPGA, and there are some videos online of it animating a rotating teapot and a Phong-shaded torus, along with the results of recently-added mipmap support. Recently, Jeff Bush got together with the founder of the Open Graphics Project, and they co-wrote a peer-reviewed publication about this GPU and some experiments they did, which was recently presented at a well-respected academic CS conference (ISPASS). Although its developer and other hobbyists are doing this for fun, academics and engineers who specialize in GPU architecture are already showing interest in using Nyuzi for their own research (e.g. link, link), which gives them finally an open platform to estimate not just cycle count but also clock frequency, energy, and circuit area effects of GPU design experiments.

This is common in education: people want to teach X, so they bluntly approach X.

I recently had a conversation with K.A. Ericsson--a brilliant man who has driven research in the area of learning and developing expertise--and our exchange included a minor discussion of using his Deliberate Practice in education. His interest was largely targeted at incorporating better educational techniques into the classroom, and he lamented that he only saw an improvement in *learning* and not an improvement in the long-term career of the students; I debated the merits of teaching the students the techniques of learning, rather than simply using them.

To put it simply: he found a better way to teach programming, mathematics, music, and medical diagnosis; I told him he should teach *that* *method* to students so they can independently plan their approach to new information and skills. We didn't debate so much as discuss. His largest problem in the field is the scientific one: it's ridiculously hard to measure those things, and he's a scientist and needs to formally identify empirical results. I'm an engineer: at the cost of a constant drift toward dogma (which, hopefully, the scientists can counterbalance with their research), I take pieces and assumptions such as "education improves a person's ability to thrive" and work on the individual pieces along the way, assuming that optimizing each input will optimize the output, which acts as an input to the next piece. In other words: rather than asking, "If I make people more academically capable, do they actually become more effective and advantaged in their adult lives?", I simply say, "We must give these people the ability to learn more effectively so they have more tools to use in their adult lives, thus giving them an advantage."

Now go back to the original topic: What's a good software engineering project to teach high school kids programming?

If you want to be a software engineer, you should know about planning, risk, and research. You need a cursory grasp of project management, specifically of defining requirements and breaking down the work; you don't need EVM, schedule management, human resources management, procurement, or all that other stuff. You need to learn to make decisions about architecture. You need not only languages, but methods.

People want to teach students programming languages and call it programming. "Can you construct a conditional loop?" "Can you make a class, and call object members?" They think that's the starting point. It's ludicrous, like teaching someone construction by starting them on building a small shed, instead of on the fundamentals of wood and fasteners and the proper architecture of a stable structure. Apprentices are kept under strict watch and taught as they carry out tasks of increasing complexity, not loosed on their own to build rickety hovels that pass as homes.

When I learned what little I know about plumbing, the first lessons involved copper pipe and an acetylene torch; we joined six inch lengths of pipes together with flux and solder. The construction students went on to learn about routing water supply and waste systems, using PVC and CPVC, constructing stable floors, and architecting a complete building with proper building practices. It was not about building houses, but about knowing how houses were built and why they were stable.

You must learn planning, architecture, and design patterns before you learn to build something which uses planning, architecture, and design patterns. The common-sense answer that the student can somehow force something simple to work is broken: this teaches the student bad habits of thinking, and forces them to do excessive work laboring to produce something with little understanding of how to go about it. You should focu

"Terraced and terrorist don't sound that much alike"

You've obviously never been to Accrington. Where I grew up there were plenty who'd pronounce both as approximately "terst". Go look up Fred Dibnah https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

That was a disaster when New York City tried that

Tom Waits : "Reality is for people who can't face drugs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Sorry about your friends. A good friend of mine also was bipolar, smoked a lot of grass and commited suicide. But knowing his history, it's pretty clear to me grass was actually a way for him to cope with his shitty life. He found his dead mother in her bathtub while he was a teenager, and had a 20+ year depression. Fuck, it's been 5 years he's gone, and I still didn't really realize I'll never see him again. RIP mate.

8-bit computers

& Automated farms

Teachers don't have to know anything. "Follow these good tutorials" or better yet. "Here's your project for the semester". Building the logic by hand they might accidentally learn basics.

Teach them to change the colors of anything in the game. Teach them hex and how to count to 16.

I used to hack around in a hex editor to change how much money I started with in Oregon Trail.

People have built 8-bit computers from logic blocks

You can use the logic to build automated systems.

Watching people build in Minecraft mirrors a lot of what my job looks like working with Simulink.

It's barely a pretty GUI on top of basic logic.

I could see a 6-7th grade course on 'building an automated farm' following tutorials and then breaking down what they did into logic diagrams.

You could easily train 8th & 9th graders in industrial automation tools if they were interested in the subject material.

If this leads to a means of rapidly computing solutions in knot theory that are currently very difficult to solve then it is a big deal, and if that is also applicable to string theory who knows, it could be worth a Nobel Prize eventually.

But what would I know, I know just enough to think this when I read the article, https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Rachel Maddow did cover that several times.
It used to be available under a group header "Uganda be kidding me" on her show's NBC site, before NBC changed the format of the site... and other things.
Now you have to search Youtube for all the videos.

And pretty quickly, these guys start popping up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

You know... guys who organize National Prayer Breakfast(s) and who think that Jesus was awesome - like Hitler, Mao, Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, Bin Laden...

That second link is pretty interesting, thanks. Seems like something people never really hear about.

And about evil doers doing the evil that evil doers do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Maybe just a handjob...
obligatory Silicon Valley reference.

your little two-bit company's experience not relevant, large scale manufacturing of electronics IS and can be done in the USA.

Sorry my friend but I'm in the industry and I make my living from global sourcing of electronics. I've worked in Fortune 500 companies doing global supply chain analysis and sourcing. Pretty much ALL large scale assembly of electronics is done outside the US. We have some chip fabs and we do some specialty work in some vertical industries but if it involves any meaningful amount of labor it is almost always done in countries with low labor rates. (in other words not the US) The supply chains for the components are largely in Asia so it is most economical to do assembly there as well especially given the cheap labor. That's not an opinion. It's a fact. You believe that large scale mfg of electronics can be done in the US but to believe that you have to ignore the last 30 years of evidence. Your ideology is not based in fact.

supply chain is global, anything can be sent to USA

Not economically it can't. Shipping them across the ocean for final assembly is a LOT more expensive than assembling them first and then shipping a finished product. It's generally far cheaper to assembly an iphone in china than it is to ship a screen + a circuit board + a shell + the rest and then assemble in the US with higher labor rates.

apple is also a hardware design company and has things built

Apple is a software company that sells their software in a pretty box. I've already linked to Steve Jobs himself saying so explicitly. They manufacture almost nothing tangible themselves and have no particular expertise in manufacturing. They outsourced their manufacturing because they don't make their profits from it. Apple designs nice hardware to help sell their software but almost nobody would pay a premium for a Macintosh running Windows without OSX. The iPhone hardware is no better than any number of Android phones and nobody would pay premium prices for an iPhone running Android. Apple does design because nobody would buy their products if they were poorly designed. That just gets them in the game.

Fast Track Trade. look it up, president has the power

Fast track trade authority is an authorization given by congress to the president for a limited time to negotiate a trade deal which Congress still has to approve with an up or down vote. It does not give the president any sort of authority to force companies to manufacture goods inside the US.

Unfortunately, the only thing in the Senate Ted Cruz is the head of, is the Senate Subcommittee on Space and Science (NASA).

And when Cruz runs up against someone reasonably intelligent, it clearly shows. In this hearing before the Senate Subcommittee, watch as Cruz tries to subtly make his point that NASA was spending too much money on climate change. NASA Administrator Charles Bolden tactfully makes a fool of Cruz by pointing out some key points: 1) He doesn't know what numbers Cruz is talking about because they are not the official budget numbers (Cruz is a liar) and 2) the decrease in space exploration was directed by Congress to NASA to spend less (Cruz is a hypocrite).

...before someone superimposes burkas into this

I think that Trump's ridiculous statements have less to do with him being stupid than with him courting the stupid demographic.

It's the stupid courting the stupid.

"So if these people are against personal ownership then they can't be capitalist."

You're historically illiterate if you believe this, capitalism has always not followed its own rules. The history of capitalism is confiscating the commons from the people. Copyright and IP law is just another form of enclosure that has been going on a long time historically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Energy subsidies

http://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/subsidies/

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

"So if these people are against personal ownership then they can't be capitalist."

You're historically illiterate if you believe this, capitalism has always not followed its own rules. The history of capitalism is confiscating the commons from the people. Copyright and IP law is just another form of enclosure that has been going on a long time historically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure

Energy subsidies

http://www.imf.org/external/np/fad/subsidies/

Our brains are much worse at reality and thinking than thought. Science on reasoning:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ

Protectionism for the rich and big business by state intervention, radical market interference.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

Donald Trump says he'd like to make Apple "start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of other countries."

He can like whatever he wants but it's not possible for a lot of reasons.
1) Labor costs are too high in the US to be competitive on assembly work of that scale. I know this because I run a company that does contract assembly of electric products. Even Apple's profit margins aren't fat enough to make that possible.
2) The supply chain for all the components does not exist in the US. That business left the US a looong time ago.
3) Apple is actually a software company. If you put Android on their gear, nobody is going to pay a premium for it. The margins on their product are decidedly not in building the computer and Apple has no particular manufacturing expertise.
4) Apple doesn't build their computers. They hire other companies to do it. Same with Dell, HP, etc. The companies that actually build these things aren't US companies.
5) The president doesn't have the authority to do that and even if he did it would be a REALLY stupid idea. The only thing he would accomplish is to make it difficult for those companies to compete. Samsung isn't going to start building their machines in the US. Manufacturing goes where the costs are lowest and frequently that is not in the US thanks to high labor costs and in some cases regulations.

If Trump (or anyone) thinks this is a good idea, why start or stop with Apple?

It isn't a good idea and Trump is pandering. He knows perfectly well that it isn't possible, practical or a good idea. But he's more than happy to lie to people too dumb or ignorant to understand supply chain economics.

Obligatory Louis C.K.

Don't know about biofuels, but there are proposals and some development work going on along these lines which actually do help the fleet. The reason for that is simple: you know which is the most valuable and important ship in the fleet? The aircraft carrier? The guided missile cruisers? The landing craft? Nope, it's the ugly, lowly oiler. Unless these ships are successful in their mission, the entire fancy multi-billion dollar fleet grinds to a halt within a week. You don't see spots on them being promoted in military advertising, but the oiler is really the centerpiece. When the fleet is out, all the oiler does is continuously hop around the carrier battle group while everybody sucks on its pipe like a total addict. And once the oiler is out, it's in a mad dash to the nearest middle eastern port for a refill and a mad dash back to the fleet. Without a continuous supply of fuel (and the fleet goes through *lots* of it), all your carrier escort ships stop and all flight activity stops. Essentially, at that point the fleet is useless, a victory to the enemy without a single shot fired.
So the new idea is at least partially solving this problem by synthesizing fuels directly in deployment. The carrier has plenty of nuclear power. At the very least, in theory, this can be used to synthesize jet fuel and keep the air superiority. This could help significantly lower the burden on the supply line to the fleet and thus increase the fleet's combat effectiveness. Current problems involve cost, buying fossil fuels is just too cheap. But it will not remain so forever.

... basing any assets at remote locations in Africa

The lowest I go is Craftsman @ Sears.

ETCG on Tools really sums up the situation. If you're going to low, just go to Harbor Freight. They are going to be around honoring warranties long after Sears is naught but a memory. The Mac and Snap-On tools are a little nicer to hold, and sometimes fit where other tools don't because they are a little smaller, but they're not all that amazing. People buy those tools because the truck shows up. On the other hand, they sell tools HF doesn't have. If I want cam locating fixtures for an Audi V8, Snap-On actually has those, and they're cheap for some reason.

... promotes designed obsolescence and waste, because the highest value is profit and not making sure you make best use of your resources. There is just way too much waste and shit being thrown away in our current world. The human animal is not rational.

John Oliver - A piece of food waste

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8xwLWb0lLY

Tom Scott, in a Numberphile Video, points out that even compared to the sort of variation you get with how human languages treat numbers, invented languages like Klingon tend to be rather bland - for example, an English-like base-10 number system with different words.

When creating alien languages and fantasy languages which are definitely not supposed to be like English, how do you get the requisite amount of "otherness" to the language? How difficult is it to make a truly "foreign" language, and not simply get the linguistic equivalent of rubber-forehead aliens? ... or is that typically not what you're after?

I doubt very much that ordinary Roman citizens ... corrected each other's grammar.

Wrong you are

Mirror probably not the best source for that.

I'm much more inclined to believe they don't care how they are labelled.

It's probably more an intelligence agency thing.

They the cia has been caught so many times funding Isis now they need to try and make a distinction between the murderous Muslims they are giving money and guns to. And the murderous Muslims that murder people.

Suuure they have. You keep telling yourself that....

True, but one of them is Clare ... my point? Duhno, got distracted by that accent =)

posting anon due to embarrassment ...

Nope. VW is known for its high build quality and tight manufacturing tolerances, so I presume the must indeed be quite fastidious in their tests. You can see some of it in this film. However, I don't think they do anything fundamentally different to other manufacturers in that regard.

...Comcrap have them by the balls now, it's just a matter of time before they start squeezing them to push up subscription rates for Netflix customers....

Comcast already has all over the top video providers in their firm grip via the data caps that are being instituted.

.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Unfortunately, LOX/RP-1 like SpaceX uses now isn't a great fuel for lunar operations. For a small lunar craft, you want something that has very small, light and simple engines, like a monoprop or hypergolic biprop; if your landing craft is bigger, you want something very high ISP. In both cases it's about keeping your mass down because you're so far down the chain on the rocket equation that any small change in mass (esp on the return stage) has a huge impact on the launch mass. Things that LOX/RP-1 excels at, such as thrust, aren't very important in lunar operations. And it would be extremely hard to make RP-1 there because of the shortage of carbon (even hydrogen is unavailable in most locations, but there are some isolated places where it appears to be present in good quantities).

In terms of lunar-manufactured propellants, obviously LOX/LH has gotten a lot of attention. But another interesting one is ALICE - aluminum-ice. Aluminum is an extremely energetic metal - we don't see this side of it often because its surface coating of aluminum oxide is so effective at shielding it. But aluminum can burn not only in oxygen but also carbon dioxide and water (which is why when you weld aluminum you can't use CO2 as a shielding gas). There's only a few other elements out there whose oxides aluminum won't gladly strip the oxygens from at high temperatures - which is why thermite works, and why it can explode fiercely in contact with water. Its affinity for oxygen is so much greater than water's that the two actually make a pretty strong propellant combination - the key is getting past that oxide layer (which has been achieved pretty well in lab scale propellant mixes). The main advantage of ALICE over LOX/LH in lunar operations is not having to deal with leaky, frigid, low density hydrogen.

Unfortunately, while aluminum oxides are incredibly abundant on the moon, ALICE doesn't work where you don't have water ice. You can't just burn a stoichometric ratio of aluminum and oxygen because the hydrogen is actually very important - burned aluminum (aluminum oxide) condenses out at very high temperatures. No gas = no expansion = no thrust**. You need another gas - the lighter the better, and nothing beats hot hydrogen - to take the heat from the aluminum oxide (not just the heat of combustion, but also the heat of condensation). So this rules out most of the moon, only water-rich areas (albeit, those are the places you'd want to set up a colony). Elsewhere, you could use excess oxygen as your heat transfer gas, but at 16 AMU, it's no lightweight. Another possibility would be to outgas helium from regolith, but you'd have to go through a lot of regolith for that much helium.

On Mars it's much easier, as both carbon and hydrogen are abundant. SpaceX rightfully realized that for Mars you either need a very high ISP or a local propellant supply in order to have reasonable launch masses, and have opted for the latter with the Raptor LOX/Methane engine that they're working on. But that's just one of numerous possibilities on the red planet. A more unusual possibility involves the use of the abundant soil perchlorates as an oxidizer with any number of potential fuel species - they're easier to store than LOX and lower energy to produce (albeit lower performance).

** Likewise, when aluminum is added to a hydrocarbon mixture, the optimum ratio of oxygen, hydrocarbon and aluminum is one where the carbon only burns to CO, not CO2 - you want your carbon exhausts in a gaseous form, but your main goal as far as energy release goes is to burn the aluminum; the extra energy you get from carrying additional oxygen to fully burn the carbon is more efficiently spent carrying more stoichiometric mix of aluminum and oxygen for them to burn together.

I'm pretty sure they're not the same, but I'll admit I had the same thought.

The prisoners are there because they were at one point believed to be terrorists and unlawful combatants.

Agreed.

How many cases can someone find of people moved to Gitmo who did not fit those conditions? I'm willing to learn something.

That depends on how we parse your question. If the question is, "How many people were take to Gitmo for confinement that were known at the time to have no involvement with al Qaida, its affiliates, or terrorism?" the answer is zero to the best of my recollection. If the question is, "How many people were taken to Gitmo for confinement due to suspicion of involvement with al Qaida, its affiliates, or terrorism, but were later thought to be innocent of it?", as I recall the answer is on the order of a couple of hundred of the approximately 800 that were ever held there, with a caveat. Of the people that were claimed to be "totally innocent" of involvement with terrorism and released, something like 20-30% of them were found back on the battlefield involved with al Qaida, the Taliban, or other extremists. It seems many of them were able to either hide their involvement or explain away things to the point they were released. Then there is the case of the Ulighars who were involved with militant groups, but directed at the oppression of the People's Republic of China and considered not to be a threat to the US. The problem for them was where to send them? It was considered impossible to send them back to China where it was expected they would be arrested and tortured. So in summary there is no chance Assange will end up there unless there is some significant and direct involvement with terrorism that we don't know about.

Communists and fascists have some surface resemblances, but in ideology are far different, as is much of the practice. That they are close is just a bunch of ignorant right-wing propaganda.

On the contrary, they are from the same part of the political spectrum (Left/Progressive), have many similar goals, and in the past have formed alliances and worked together. There are significant areas of overlap in their practice, and in terms of ideology there is very much a certain "different side of the same coin" aspect to them. Whereas Nazis exterminated by race, Communists exterminated by class, and the little known fact is that Marx and Engels called for extermination by both class and race. Whereas Communists tend to be internationalist socialists the fascists tend towards nationalist socialism.

Have you heard of the documentary, "The Soviet Story"? It's creation was supported by a group in the European Parliament. It would be well worth your time to view it as it exposes a lot of little known history that is quite revealing. I believe you can watch it on itunes or Amazon video for a modest fee if your library doesn't have it. It can be found on Youtube, but ususally not with English subtitles for foreign language sections. Although you do miss things without the subtitles it can still be worth watching if you can't find it anywhere else and can't pay to watch the localized version. Please, by all means watch it!

Telling the Soviet story - A new film about Nazi-Soviet links

The Soviet Story 1 of 9

You might also find the book (discussed below) Liberal Fascism informative even if it is written in an American context. (Aspects of it might be a bit disorienting since the American political spectrum labeling is a bit different than Europe and the rest of the Anglosphere.) There are other books that discuss these ideas as well.

Liberal Fascism

Benito Mussolini was a socialist and earned the title “Il Duce” as the leader of the socialists in Italy. When he founded the fas

And trying for the third time to see what happens in the editor now: Marc Andreessen on Big Breakthrough Ideas and Courageous Entrepreneurs https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Looks like a fun, well made level.

That's just insulting to watch somebody play a classic like Doom with vertical look and excessive strafing. You used to hold a button down to strafe instead of turn... Hell, you used to have to hold a button down to look up - in Quake!

Like watching someone put ketchup on a steak, I'm glad you enjoyed it, but I don't feel like eating anymore thanks.

Now that I think about it, a supernova is just a failed black hole, no?

When a star runs out of fuel, it explodes as a supernova. Sometimes the supernova collapses to become a neutron star or a pulsar. A large star that goes supernova might collapse into a small black hole.

As for my original comment, it was a reference to Spaceballs.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXOAc5yt218

Looks like a fun, well made level.

The C64 was my second home computer as a kid (my first was a Timex Sinclair 1000).

Commodore's other great contribution was this TV commercial. which introduced me to Bach's Invention #13. All these years later I still think of Commodore when I head that piece. I've got an outstanding bounty offer to my son for $100 if he learns to play it competently. :)

The C64 was my second home computer as a kid (my first was a Timex Sinclair 1000).

Commodore's other great contribution was this TV commercial. which introduced me to Bach's Invention #13. All these years later I still think of Commodore when I head that piece. I've got an outstanding bounty offer to my son for $100 if he learns to play it competently. :)

Reminds of Murray Gell-Mann's creative process: saturation, incubation and illumination.

There's an excellent YouTube video of a talk by John Cleese about creativity. One of the key elements of creating an opportunity for creativity to arise is continuing to ponder and not just taking the first solution that comes to mind.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Eh, you can't be the real Mister Liberty until you've proven yourself to be a bad enough president to save the dudes>

Watch this video of BMW's I3 factory building new tech vehicles in a new tech factory. Now read TFA and learn that Divergent Technologies process doesn't use 3D-printing for the bodies (too heavy) or even the vast bulk of the chassis - the hyped 3D-process is for glorified lugs (they term them "nodes") used to build a tube frame. Consider the relatively tiny contribution of lugs to the assembly of a fully equipped car and it makes very little difference how those lugs are produced.

Then there's the claim that by printing different styles of lug (and some other parts, but not the bulk of the car) they can easily switch from building one type of car to another. If this is not wishful thinking intended to attract gullible investors, I don't what it is. To make effective use of this, they would need a super-agile assembly line stocked with most of the parts needed for all the vehicles they will possible build. The article admits that 3D-printing doesn't solve the majority of parts needs.

There's also the notion that by 3D-printing parts, replacement parts can be made on demand without special tooling. This is a very good point, and undoubtedly one that traditional car manufacturers are starting to look into, even for parts that may have been cast or otherwised conventionally produced for vehicle production.

Lastly, there's the anti-EV nonsense from Kevin Czinger, Divergent's CEO. Let me say that I believe his 1500lb natural gas-powered concept car has a lower environmental impact a Tesla SUV recharged off today's power grid. Today's electric cars are not a clear win when charged with coal generated electricity. Especially when you consider a heavy EV with very large batteries like that Tesla. The real promise of electric vehicles is their ability to use - and drive the development of - renewable sources of electricity. Green cars of the future will have to be both light and shun fossil fuels.

Easy. I reflash it with the original firmware image before use, or better yet, something superior.

Unless you use a JTAG to force a flash, you are trusting the honesty/reliability of the existing software to actually update the chip, which is the equivalent of trusting that user mode AV can assure you if a machine is clean or not.

At DEFCON this year there was a demonstration of infecting the LTE modem in a tablet (OS independent) which not only would persist OS wipes, but even attempted firmware updates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

A long increasing problem in computing is that you don't just have a single computer, but a box full of computers, many of which run it's own software stack that most of us aren't qualified to try to validate... and it's only getting worse.